


Suffering

by Mertiya



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Explicit Language, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-26
Updated: 2012-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-31 18:22:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat has nightmares, but his worst dreams are not of the Outer Ring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suffering

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is just a silly little piece that's mostly Karkat angst and some John/Karkat fluff. I hope you like it! =3

            Karkat has nightmares.

            It’s funny.  Yes, sometimes he still dreams of the Outer Ring, like everyone.  Like a normal troll.  Though now that the game is over, the nightmares are fewer and farther between.  They still come, sometimes, but they are faded now, like the residue of something you washed down the sink every day for years.  Presumably the Outer Ring still exists, but for whatever reason, its influence on the trolls is muted now.

            But those aren’t the nightmares that hurt him anymore.  Those are just the screaming heebie-jeebies, to use some ridiculous human expression.  The nightmares that come to him now are echoes, strong echoes, echoes that bounce through his head like something exciting the resonant frequency of a rubber band.  And, of course, tonight he has slipped into them again.

            _The first thing he feels is the hot bands about his wrists again.  Not again.  Still.  They weren’t hot when they were put on him at first; they were ice cold.  But he has struggled against them for so long that his body heat has warmed them, and his freakish red blood has oozed out and coated them.  In some ways it was more comfortable like that, at first, but now the blood has dried and crusted rough against his wrists._

_He has hung like this for a night, now, the pain in his arms growing steadily.  There is also the stiffening pain of the muscles across his body, and the blooming bruises where they beat him, and the awful pain in his side where the spear went in.  But that pales in comparison to the pain of his thoughts.  In the double set of memories, he doesn’t know which is worse—the memories of the pain and hatred, or the memory of the kindness turned to bitter failure._

_All his friends were dying.  They wanted to play the game.  They wanted to make the universe.  But they weren’t strong enough; they paid the penalty.  They tried to fix it; they thought that if they could just restart, pass things on to their descendents—their ancestors, once, they could still, really, win.  They had been so wrong._

_He thinks of little Spinneret, quiet, grinning, nerdy, and shudders away from the thought of the callous pirate she’d become, the manic rapist of the unlucky.  How could things have come to this?  The seeds must have been there, even before the universal reversal.  Bitterness swells through his stomach, and he spits the mutated red blood from his mouth.  It was a cancer, this Scratch, a cancer, and he had helped in the making of it.  Perhaps it serves him right._

_The night is ending, and now, he knows, the true torment is coming.  Already the white rays of the Alternian sun are peering above the horizon.  No.  Please, please, please no.  He can’t—he can’t—_

_The metal of the manacles heats quickly to burning, and he writhes against them, but that only increases the agony.  Red fills his eyes, and he cannot tell if he is going blind, weeping, or bleeding.  He wants it to be over; he doesn’t know how he can endure this pain.  He howls with it, he writhes with it, he burns with it._

_This pain, which becomes hatred.  This hatred, which becomes pain.  It builds up inside him, an acid poison with nowhere to go, until finally he is consumed by it, screaming with a voice torn to shreds by torment, and there is nothing left of him but rage, and hate, and failure._

_Bitter failure._

Karkat cries out, thrashing upright in his hammock, the closest thing they’ve managed to put together to a sopor cocoon.  His throat is hoarse with screaming, and, worse, there are tears welling up in his stupid fucking useless eyes.  He is such a useless sack of shit.

            “Karkat!”  And then there are arms, human ones, around him, thin and spindly, soft and squishy, and there is a human weight pressing down on top of him.  The hammock protests, strainingly.

            “Oh god,” Karkat whispers—no, it’s more of a whimper, really.

            “Karkat, what’s wrong?”  The big blue eyes staring into his are concerned, the ridiculous teeth sticking out even further than they need to as they trap the bottom lip beneath them in worry.

            “I just had a fucking nightmare again, that’s all.” 

            “Oh.”  His matesprit snuggles down beside him and gives him a chaste kiss on the cheek.  “Well, that’s okay.  Because it’s over, now!  And I’m here!”  John’s goofy grin provokes a wave of grudging warm fuzzy feeling, and Karkat _almost_ starts to feel better.

            “Maybe you should come into my bed and cuddle with me!” John suggests.  “I get all lonely at night!”

            A stronger troll than Karkat would say no.  A stronger troll than Karkat would not need to be cuddled just because of a stupid nightmare.  Fuck it.  Karkat is sick of trying to be strong.  Besides, it will make John happy.

            “Okay.”  Fuck, he’s practically sniffling right now, _sniffling_.  Useless sack of crap.

            “C’mon.”  John tugs at his arm, and he lets himself be dragged out of the hammock and pushed into John’s strange, silly, human sleeping device.  John wraps his arms and legs around him, and then Karkat is crying.  He has never cried like this before, not in front of anyone, not since he was a little grub, and John looks a little scared.  But he just hugs Karkat harder and rubs his back.  “You’re going to be fine!  I believe in you!”

            John believes in him.  Karkat doesn’t believe in himself, but maybe he doesn’t have to.  Maybe he just has to believe in John.  And, hell, that’s not exactly hard to do, because much as he pretends it’s not true, John is basically the most wonderful thing ever to have happened to him.

            He pulls John even closer and kisses him clumsily on the lips.  He is pretty incompetent at this, but that’s okay, John doesn’t mind.  John just snuggles closer and kisses him back.  And, as John’s body relaxes in his arms, and John starts making kind of adorable little snoring noises, Karkat feels himself getting sleepy too.  Somehow, he doesn’t think the nightmares will be back tonight.  And maybe that’s enough.


End file.
